AgentNein said:
Starke said:
AgentNein said:
laryri said:
He's a former operative. Calling it now.
Haha, yeah I called this back when Serenity came out. Seems fairly obvious to me, there were so many weird parallels between him and The Operative. Especially that by the end of Serenity (spoilers) The Operative had 'lost his faith in his world', which I could see leading to him becoming a man of the cloth as well?
Its pretty apparent that he's not actually a man of the cloth. In the pilot when Kaylee first hawks at him about Serentity, she assumes he's a shepard, and you can see a momentary pause before he decides to take that role. After that, he's working a cover.
About the only way he could be something other than an Operative is if he was affiliated with Alliance intelligence in some other capacity.
I could see a curveball in that he was insturmental in the Browncoat's defeat, which would give him a very solid reason to never ever tell Mal about his history.
It's all up for interpretation, but I honestly feel like that might be a misinterpretation. It's pretty obvious he had something to do with the alliance, but he was definitely a 'man of the cloth' by the start of Firefly. There's virtually no reason he would need to work an angle...
That's actually quite true, it is all interpertation.
The evidence is: He is very familiar with Alliance operation proceedures, and has an identicard that flags him for VIP treatment within the Alliance Military. He is familiar with the criminal syndicates that are active. He is very well trained with weapons. (Aiming for the kneecaps isn't something you can just decide to do, he is THAT good.)
A somewhat reasonable analysis of this is, that he was a former Operative, or highly placed in Alliance intelligence. It's somewhat unlikely that he was a main line alliance officer, otherwise the officers in Safe would have either recognized him or his name, when, instead they show no recognition.
The dubious evidence is: there's a pause in the pilot when Kaylee assumes he's a shepard before he responds.
My interpertation of that pause is, up to that moment, he hasn't claimed he's a shepard to any of the other ships, just that he never married, and isn't a grandpa. If he is former Alliance Operative, that isn't something he would admit to a total stranger, so creating a false identity makes a lot of sense, (remember, he was originally only going to be a passenger, so this would have been a short term identity.) Once he's a member of the crew, he knows, because of Mal and Zoe's history, that if he revealed who he was, they would never trust him again, or worse.
The angle is, he made a snap decision when he was first comming on the ship, in the hope that it would keep Kaylee (and the rest of the crew) from asking too many questions. As time goes on, because it wasn't a planned cover, it starts to break in places. (Basically any time Mal asks "how would a Shepard know something like that?")
